A Fearsome Doubt

by Charles Todd

  He himself had never craved promotion. It was a mark of achievement, but he had long since discovered that he preferred dealing with inquiries firsthand instead of rising to the level of delegating authority to others. He had found too often that objectivity was lost with ambition, and pleasing one’s superior officer became more important than getting to the root of an issue.

  Philip Nettle, who had been the first officer charged with the Shaw case—or the Winslow case, as it had begun—had complained several times that Bowles was pushing him to conclusions. “You can’t know that,” Bowles was fond of saying. “Stick with what you do know, man, and leave imagination to the press.”

  “Aye,” Hamish agreed. “It isna’ always wise to look for complexity when there is none!”

  Complexity, Rutledge retorted as he walked out the door, was often what saved the innocent. Judging only by the obvious facts could lead a policeman astray.

  “It isn’t the guilt of a man,” he said as he turned the crank on his motorcar, “that we set out to establish, but the truth in a case. And sometimes that’s buried deep.”

  “Aye,” Hamish agreed bitterly. “I wouldna’ be lying sae deep in a French grave, if there had been time to sort out the truth. . . .”

  Wincing, Rutledge put his motorcar into gear and turned out onto the street. “You gave me no choice,” he said.

  “I couldna’ give you a choice,” Hamish agreed. “Else there would have been a longer list of the dead on my ain soul. I couldna’ bear it. As ye’re haunted, so was I.”

  UNSETTLED THAT NIGHT, Rutledge considered what to do about the Shaws. The wisest course was to ask Mrs. Shaw to hand over the locket to Chief Superintendent Bowles and wash his own hands of decision. He could walk away then with a clear conscience. But if Bowles refused to take the matter any further, what then? Push that small, damning piece of jewelry out of his own mind, as if it didn’t exist? Pretend that there was no question about Shaw’s guilt, even though he knew there was?

  He’d seen the locket. He had absolutely no doubt about its authenticity. The truth was, he wasn’t as certain that he could trust Bowles.

  And whatever he decided, the rearrangement of the papers in his desk drawer had left Rutledge with a feeling that Bowles was already looking over his shoulder. Waiting—for what?

  “For you to put a foot wrong,” Hamish responded. “I’d no’ gie him the shovel to bury you with.”

  “I’ve been pitched into doing the devil’s work,” Rutledge said. “Any way you look at it. Bowles may crucify me for trying to find the truth. Mrs. Shaw will damn me if I walk away. And Shaw himself will haunt me until I know what happened.”

  “Aye. It’s a fearsome thing, judgment. I wouldna’ be in your shoon.”

  In the morning, tired and hampered by the restlessness that was Hamish’s response to Rutledge’s own uncertainties, Rutledge went back to the church where he had stopped on his first visit to Sansom Street.

  The rector—the name on the door read Bailey—was in his small, cluttered office at the back of the church, and rose to greet Rutledge with a quiet interest.

  “I’ve come back again,” Rutledge said, “because I have more questions to ask. They aren’t official; you can refuse to answer them, if you wish. But I need information, and there’s no other way to get it except to ask.”

  “You look tired,” Mr. Bailey remarked as the light from the windows fell on Rutledge’s face. “Sleepless night, was it?”

  One of many, he could have said. Instead, Rutledge admitted, “In a way. I’m on the horns of a dilemma, you see.” He set his hat on the chair beside him, and began to explain. Bailey listened in silence. Rutledge, trying to read his man, came to the conclusion that Bailey was not as struck by the events of the last week as he himself was. Or else hid his curiosity more cleverly.

  “I can’t resolve your problems,” the rector said when Rutledge had finished. “I have no reason to think that Ben Shaw was innocent. And no reason to believe that he was guilty. The courts drew that conclusion, not I. I simply offered comfort to the family and helped them survive.”

  “Pilate couldn’t have said it better,” Rutledge commented.

  Bailey smiled. “If I judge, to what end will that come? Should I have lectured Mrs. Shaw on her poor choice of husband?”

  “From what I’ve heard, he was a cut above her, but a poor provider.”

  “Or perhaps he’d given her a taste for the kind of life she really wanted to live, and then walked away from it himself,” Bailey pointed out. “I never discovered why he chose to work with his hands, when he might have done much better for himself using his mind.”

  “If his family rejected his wife, he may have rejected their way of life and taken up something more suitable to hers. As I remember, she was left to fend for herself from an early age. She hadn’t been given his opportunities.”

  “It’s true. She had no family to speak of. Nor did Shaw, for that matter. There was a sister, but she died shortly after the hanging. And I recall a cousin, who’d run off to Australia in 1900, after a rift with his father. There was no way to reach the man, and no reason to expect that he would come, if someone had tried. I was told he hadn’t come home for his mother’s services, when she died, and he’d been as close to her as anyone. Neville, I think his name was? And whatever caused the rift, it was apparently severe.”

  “Was there anything between Shaw’s wife and the neighbor, Cutter? He seemed to speak well of her, when interviewed. Few other people did.”

  “Cutter liked Mrs. Shaw. Why, I can’t tell you. And I won’t guess. But the odd thing was, she was very different in his company than she was ordinarily. Mary—my wife—even spoke of it, a time or two.”

  Hamish said, “Leave it, and speak to Mrs. Bailey . . .”

  For once Rutledge agreed. He asked a final question, clearing up another possible direction, as he stood to bring the interview to an end. “Did Mrs. Cutter visit the poor or the infirm, as part of her duties as a member of this church?”

  “Most of the women have served on committees to visit those who are no longer able to come to services. It’s considered a Christian duty. Again, Mary would know more about that. She has served on most of the women’s committees—the duty of a churchman’s wife.”

  Rutledge thanked him and left. He found the rectory just around the corner on a side street, a fresh coat of paint on the door setting it apart from its neighbors. Mrs. Bailey answered his knock, drying her hands on her apron. “If you’re looking for my husband, you’ll find him in the church office, this time of the morning.”

  She was a slim woman—some would say bony—with still-fair hair and a smooth face, though her throat and hands gave her true age away.

  Rutledge smiled, and replied, “My name is Rutledge. I’ve just spoken with Mr. Bailey, and he suggested I might do better to ask you the questions I’m trying to answer.”

  “Rutledge—” She repeated the name thoughtfully. “We never met at the time, but you must be the policeman who was assigned to the Shaw inquiry.” Nodding as she placed him, she said, “My granddaughter told me you were a very fine-looking man, for a policeman. She was eight at the time, and murder had very little meaning for her, thank heavens.”

  He could feel himself turning red. Mary Bailey smiled. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid I never mind my tongue as I should. In a clergyman’s wife, it’s a dreadful sin! But I’ve found over the years that if I attach one interesting fact to someone, I can keep a face and a name in my memory forever. Helpful when everyone expects the rector’s wife to know exactly who they are and how important they might be.”

  She invited him into the kitchen, where she was making bread. The scents of warm yeast and rising dough were comforting. Her hands, moving almost without direction, began to knead the ball in the bed of flour.

  “This won’t wait,” she explained, “and I’m sure your questions won’t, either. What do you need to know? Has someone else in our parish been involved with th
e Yard?” It was as if she had someone in mind, he thought, and was fishing.

  “No, just an odd coincidence that occurred some days ago, and when it was brought to my attention, I wanted to put it to rest. A piece of the jewelry missing at the time of the Shaw murders has come to light. I’m trying to find out what—if any—significance that might have.”

  She studied him, her blue eyes reading more than he was comfortable with. “And as the inspector involved, you want to know if this changes anything that—happened.”

  “In a word—yes,” he replied.

  Nodding, she kept her eyes on her hands now. “Yes. Well. What is it you want to know?”

  He began indirectly. “Mrs. Shaw. Did she serve on any of the women’s committees? Visiting the ill, the poor?”

  “She didn’t attend services here after her marriage. But she was never comfortable with that sort of need. I called on her once to ask if she might know of anyone looking to be a companion to an elderly man recovering from a leg fracture. I thought at the time it might mean an extra bit of money for her, if she could use it. But she was clear on that point, as well as her dislike of dealing with the infirm.”

  “Her neighbor, Mrs. Cutter . . .”

  “Was very active, until her health broke. We could always depend on Janet Cutter. And she was a very good cook, as well. She’d often bake a little extra and put it in a basket to take to someone under the weather. Still, Janet kept to herself, you know, she wasn’t one to sit and gossip. I put it down to shyness. But she seemed to have a kind heart.”

  “And fingers that stuck to bits of jewelry?” Hamish asked.

  “Mr. Cutter was one of the few people who defended Mrs. Shaw when we were closing in on her husband. He thought she was a very different person from the general impression of her. His wife, on the other hand, was not as kind.”

  “Mrs. Shaw was never a very pretty woman, but she has a very bold and defiant way about her.” Mrs. Bailey added more flour to the bowl. “Some men like that.”

  Rutledge tried to picture Mrs. Shaw flirting, and failed. He said as much.

  Mrs. Bailey laughed. “I never suggested she was flirting. But her manner was bold. She could manage tradesmen very well, she could take charge of a situation and deal with it, she was unflappable. If the butcher overcharged her or brought her a less than satisfactory bit of beef, she would face him down without embarrassment or tears. ‘Now see here, Mr. Whoever, I wasn’t born yesterday, and I know that that chicken is old, and if you don’t take it back, I shall complain to my neighbors about the poor service you’re offering these days!’ ”

  “How do you know this?” he asked, intrigued.

  “Because,” she said, turning to face him, “the same tradesmen come to my door, and over the years, you hear things.” She dropped her voice a level and said in a brusque tone, “ ‘I fear Mrs. Shaw isn’t herself this week. She complained fiercely about my cabbages. I ask you, have you ever had reason to doubt my cabbages?’ It’s a way tradesmen have, to play one customer against another, and if I say, ‘Your cabbages have always been quite lovely,’ then the rest of his route hears that Mrs. Bailey at the rectory is particularly fond of his cabbages.”

  “What did Ben Shaw think about Mrs. Cutter?”

  “Ah, interesting you should ask that,” she murmured, giving the bread dough a good thumping. “I think—think, mind you, there’s no proof—that when he was younger and drinking more heavily, Henry Cutter was not above striking his wife when in his cups. Ben Shaw was not used to the world he married into and came to live in. He was sentimental, and rather nice. He would have been the knight in shining armor, if Janet Cutter had cried on his shoulder. Ready to take on her battles, but not to move into her bed, if you follow me.”

  “And yet he was accused of smothering three elderly women,” Rutledge gently reminded her.

  “As a policeman,” she reminded him in turn, “you are not easily fooled. Well, after nearly fifty years dealing with a church, one comes to understand politics, human nature, and human frailty in unexpected ways. The infirm are not always pleasant and clean and defenseless. They can be ill-tempered, nasty, and terribly cruel. Their rooms often smell of urine-soaked bedding, dirty bodies, and bits of stale food. They have bedsores and bad breath and suspicious natures. Their caretakers often abuse them, because they’re helpless, and because patience wears thin. The knight in shining armor come to nail up shingles and repair windows doesn’t last long, even if the first time he’d arrived in full array. This doesn’t excuse Ben Shaw, you understand—but it is important to realize how easily such a thing might have happened.”

  Rutledge had not walked into the scenes of the crimes—Philip Nettle had done that. The women had long since been removed to the morgue, thin and small under their sheets, defenseless and pathetic. “You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that anyone might have killed them. A man. A woman. Not a monster.”

  “What I found most unusual about the crimes was that anyone had killed the three women at all. Why not just randomly take what you like? A silver spoon here, a man’s pocket watch there.”

  “They would have missed something—”

  “Yes, but who can say when they missed that spoon just how long it had been gone? We’ve had cases where men come to the door with apparently respectable intent—selling mousetraps or books of household hints. And then finding no one at home, they break in and take what they like. Easier to do when the inhabitants are elderly, ill women asleep in their beds.”

  He’d looked into that himself. Chance burglaries, an easy way to add a few pounds to a door-to-door seller’s pocket. There had been no reports of any such burglaries in this part of London for a year before the murders. . . .

  Hamish, intent and interested, said, “But if they complained, the auld women, and the thief had taken fright—”

  Rutledge finished the thought in his head aloud. “If Mrs. Cutter had found herself on the verge of being caught and hanged, would Ben Shaw have volunteered to go back and speak to the old women—and when they refused to be silent, silenced them forever?”

  Mrs. Bailey set her loaf in the waiting pan. “It’s a shocking suggestion, Inspector. Not one that I care to contemplate, to tell you the truth. Is there anything else you wish to know?”

  Still—it made sense. It would explain how a man like Shaw had gotten himself involved with murder. . . .

  Mrs. Bailey had been more helpful than she knew.

  But Rutledge realized as he drove across the Thames back to the Yard that he might also have underestimated the rector’s wife. . . .

  In a parish where there were no garden tea parties or Sunday luncheons with the gentry, the rector and his wife had learned how people lived with the small degradations of little money, poor health, hard work, and not much beauty. The Baileys would have had few illusions about their neighbors and over the years acquired a rather pragmatic view of their flock. They had ministered in the truest sense, without judgment.

  At what cost to themselves? he wondered.

  11

  THERE WAS A MESSAGE WAITING FOR RUTLEDGE WHEN HE arrived at the Yard.

  Chief Superintendent Bowles wanted to see him.

  Braced for an angry confrontation, Rutledge went along to Bowles’s office.

  Anything but angry, Bowles greeted him with his usual cold stare and brief command to sit down, sit down.

  There were papers all over his desk, and he hunched over them with frowning intensity before saying to Rutledge, “You’ve been in Kent, have you?”

  “Yes. To visit friends.”

  “Hmmm. What’s your opinion of these murders?”

  “I have none. I don’t know anything beyond the fact that there have been more than one.”

  “Looks bad, damned bad. The Chief Constable is not happy, and his people haven’t found anything to be going on with. Incapable lot, apparently.” Bowles had never held a high opinion of police work outside London. “No, that’s not kind. Mainly it
’s out of their line of experience. You served in the war. You’ll have a better sense of what’s happening. I’m sending you down to have a look. Be quick about it, if you can. The Chief Constable has friends in high places. Needn’t say more on that score.”

  He passed a sheaf of papers across to Rutledge, who began to scan them as he suggested, “I should think Devereaux would be the best man—”

  But Bowles paid no heed. “. . . Some bloody foreigner to blame, most likely . . .”

  Unexpectedly Rutledge was reminded of the face at the bonfire—in the headlamps of his motorcar. As if in warning.

  Rutledge looked up into the yellow eyes of his superior. They were staring at him. Speculative. Watchful.

  Deliberately taking a different tack to test the waters, Rutledge replied, “The hop-picking season is over. The extra workers have gone back to London or Maidenhead, wherever they came from. I could deal with that end of the investigation. From my desk.”

  “Worth looking into,” Bowles agreed, taking the remark as a course of action. “But they want someone on the ground in Kent. Hand over whatever you’re working on to Simpson. He’ll cope.”

  Inspector Simpson was, as everyone knew, Bowles’s latest protégé. A weak-chinned man with a spiteful nature, he was, in the words of Sergeant Gibson, “Generally to be found toadying up to Old Bowels. Right pair, the two of them!” There was rumored to be a wager on how long it would take Simpson to make chief inspector, over the list.

  Rutledge found himself wondering if it was Simpson who had gone through his desk.

  And as if reading his mind, Bowles added, “I hear a Mrs. Shaw called on you a few days ago.” A bland voice, a glance out the window to indicate that this was mere curiosity on the Chief Superintendent’s part.

  Fishing.

  Rutledge chose to be circumspect. “Yes. Ben Shaw’s widow. His hanging still haunts her. Sad story.”

  “Shall I send Simpson along to have a talk with her?” The yellow eyes were mere slits now.